engaging stories of hope and joy

The Writing Was the Easy Part

I am a technological toad. As in, I can never find the right place to put the thumb drive into the computer. Or if I luck out, figure how to get stuff from the computer onto the thumb drive. I need to haul my step-daughter down into the basement – amidst her giggles – and beg for help. Not just one time – every time.

Imagine, then, my journey into the world of self publishing. I thought writing the story was the hard part. But…….no. It’s the uploads and jpegs, the mobis and pdfs. It’s trying to understand the step-by-step directions, having been assured as to their ease of that understanding. It’s the asking for help on my Facebook writer’s group, asking to have it explained to me like I’d just dropped onto the planet and understood not a word of its language — and still not having a clue when people have coddled me and easy does’d me, it all still sounding Roman.

I read and heard that I could self-publish for free – after having sent my first ever novel (kind of a 52K word novella) to five publishing houses – start spreading the news in NYC and cheerio to London – and when I received rejections and/or silence, I turn to the pay-us-and-we‘ll-publish-it-for-ya publishers and was bullied a little here and there, and didn’t have the money for that anyway, it turns out.

By the way, that’s my first novel right over there on the left side of the page. It’s titled “Ring Around the Rosy” and it began as a short story submission for an on-line magazine requiring an apocalyptic setting and at least one character with a disability, but quickly raced past the word limit, and slowly, very slowly, with a six-month break in the writing during a big lifestyle change, it got done, now with three characters with a condition considered a disability, apocalypse or not. Or, don’t dis my ability.

So, anyway, I was strongly encouraged to turn to CreateSpace, a free self-publishing entity part of the Amazon world, for both paperback and ebook publication, and stumbled upon other similar services including IngramSpark and Draft2Digital. Well, as I’ve indicated above, I was simply incapable of figuring out how and doing the simple things they asked me to do. With the story collecting (internet) dust, and remembering a conversation I’d had with a friend in Oakland, CA when I visited back in the spring, I turned on-line to an outfit called Fiverr. It basically a business that offers the services of people from all over the planet to do their thing, whatever thing it is that you need them to do. For me, to get going, I primarily needed help with creating a cover (my skill level – none) and formatting my Word document for pdf and mobi uploads (moi skill level – ditto).

As fortune would have it – and doesn’t fortune smile on techie toads – I hired a woman in England, name of Victoria, to create a cover, including the spine (wouldn’t have thought of that) and back cover. That’s it up there, the end of the world as we know it landscape with Rosy in her chair, Teddy with his Down Syndrome, nerdy Matt the attendant, Felix, Marvin, well, all of them. It’s quite beautiful and it thrills me to look at it, and it coast me $25. Then I was fortunate to find another young women, Beenish Qureshi in Pakistan, to create the appropriate formatting for both paperback and ebook requirements ($50).

The writing of the book extended somewhere beyond a year and a half, and the finding and messaging back and forth with the Fiverr women has been going on maybe five or six weeks now. As I write this, January 12, 2017, my book – My Book – is live for sale on Amazon as an ebook for Kindle,and a couple of glitches and proofs away from a paperback you’ll be able to hold in your hands, sink back in an easy chair, and join the kids’ adventure.

This is my Blog, my opportunity to say what I think and write what I feel. The content has morphed in the two years of existence -- I began with personal tales of sillyness and drunkeness and soberness and times, places, and events within. Then I wrote a whole a lot of opinions about the world and its often sad shape, and how I thought we could make it better (re: engaging stories of hope). More recently I've taken to writing about this and that, including links to movies, Ted Talks, rock and roll, other writers' web pages, and more. These past seven years I have taken up the life of a painter, and my work can be seen on my web page ( www.buddycushmanfineart.com ) and my Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/shop/musicflower67). But I've been writing since I was just a young thing living on the Massachusetts coast, and storytelling is my home. I have a number of fiction works in varying degrees of completion, and have published two books of fiction in the last year, under the name W.B. Cushman. But it's here I get to share my whatevers of sorrow and hope, and hopefully, wonder and magic. Thanks for stopping in.